Published

From Two Posts per Year to Two per Week: A Writing Challenge

I’ve already posted about my challenge for February. Right now, you’re reading the final edition of my January challenge. The challenge, which I completed with my brother Alex was to publish two posts per week for four weeks1.

We’ve tried writing challenges in the past, using a daily word goal of 750 words. In fact, we tried back in November and failed miserably. I think I made it 4 days. When thinking about this challenge we needed to change the goal. It would have been easy to try and do the same thing. With a daily word goal I would usually end up journaling rather than writing something for publication. Instead, Caroline suggested a publishing goal. We settled on publishing twice per week.

Switching the goal forced me to actually hit publish. To get over myself thinking that I need to write an epic post and just practice writing. All this thinking and planning about writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. After 4 weeks of consistent writing I am already more comfortable when I sit down to write, and publishing doesn’t have the same scary feeling that it used to. What if my title isn’t perfect? What if I don’t tag it correctly? Every post needs a featured image in my theme. Who cares?

Instead of worrying about all that, I’ve published.

I’ve always wanted to develop the writing habit, and it’s been much easier to write when I know no one’s reading it. Even with a total of one, maybe two blog readers it’s forced me to write something semi-intelligible. I’ve had some good follow-up conversations that I wouldn’t have without publishing.

Going forward, my goal for the rest of the year is an average of one post per week. 52 new posts published. I have other projects and challenges, including other types of writing that I want to focus on and I want to free up some time to work on those over the next few months.

I still have a long way to go in becoming a better writer. Writing–and publishing–instead of over-thinking, has been my first step in that direction.